I'm starting to wonder if one of the reasons why he has not been impeached is our wonderful friend Joe Biden. As much as everyone hates Obama at this point in time can anyone really say he would be an improvement?

This right here. We have a chance to effectively put them back to the time when even collecting this information on this scale was impossible. Suddenly collecting it all won't do them any good as they can't read it all.

Plus once we get in the habit of of using encryption for everything then switching out current encryption for stronger types should be easier because its no longer an afterthought only some people worry about.

Speaking of ignored petitions, this one was featured on Techdirt a while back (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120521/12463519005/) and while it got over double the required signatures it never got a response. I guess they didn't have a press release/talking points memo handy that quite covered the issue well enough so they just ignored it.

This confuses me as well. Does this mean I'm in the wrong every time I tell somebody that our company has a product or solution for them first instead of telling them that Bob across the street can do it? Last I checked pretty much every company on earth promotes their own products and services above their competitors even if they are not as good, but Google doing this is somehow wrong?

Excellent idea. Because the word torrent is so long and hard to type we need to start using the acronym BPI for Bittorrent Payload Indicator instead. Think of all the time saved by not typing the 4 extra letters!

E. Why are you penalizing the 95% for the 5%? You donít do this in other areas of discipline at school. Even though you know some students will use their voices or bodies inappropriately in school, you donít ban everyone from speaking or moving. You know some students may show up drunk to the prom, yet you donít cancel the prom because of a few rule breakers. Instead, you assume that most students will act appropriately most of the time and then you enforce reasonable expectations and policies for the occasional few that donít. To use a historical analogy, itís the difference between DUI-style policies and flat-out Prohibition (which, if you recall, failed miserably). Just as you donít put entire schools on lockdown every time thereís a fight in the cafeteria, you need to stop penalizing entire student bodies because of statistically-infrequent, worst-case scenarios.

F. You never can promise 100% safety. For instance, you never would promise a parent that her child would never, ever be in a fight at school. So quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology. Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies, and move on.

Seems to me these points extend to well beyond education and should be taught to Congress as well. If they understood that punishing the vast majority for the acts of a few was silly then they would not try to pass new gun regulations every time there is a shooting that makes the national news when 99.999999% of gun owners never do anything wrong with their firearms.

If they understood that 100% safety is impossible they might be less likely to take away our rights and abuse us with the TSA, constitution free zones, etc.

For some reason that reminds me of this article. I know Serendipity is a major part of how I find and learn about new things online. Few things are as great as finding some random thing you never knew about and wanting to know everything about it.

I believe his point is that if they can't even catch something as minor yet obvious as an expired passport how can we expect them to do anything about something as threatening yet nebulous as terrorism? Its been shown time and again that they are ineffective but the solutions seem to be to get even more intrusive and overbearing without being more effective, mostly just to look like they are doing something to justify their existence.

I think at this point in time we have to accept that violating even more of peoples rights is not effective and that terrorism as a threat is overblown. But between the fact that people fail to understand risk and the government is good at keeping people scared we continue to march in the direction of the US becoming more and more of a police state with no benefits to show from it.

I'm not sure why format shifting would magically be wrong with books but fine with the many ways its been done in the past with audio. The only holdup I know with format shifting is having to get around DRM. This is what makes ripping a MP3 off your CD just fine and dandy but ripping a video file off a DVD or BluRay illegal.

Very much this. Once you understand how they "license" things this argument falls apart.

See, people don't come to IV and say "that's some awesome tech you have, can we get a license to use it?". Its more like they go out to people who might be doing something that infringes on a patent they hold and say "that's a nice product there, it would be a shame if something happened to it..." and either get people to license patents from them, buy into their patent pool, or they get taken to court (normally through some sort of shell company so their hands stay clean).

Understanding this makes it impossible to look at IV in a good light. They are truly a tollbooth on innovation.

Uh, but was he really in violation of anything? They dropped the trumped up immigration fraud charges that they were only using to try to strongarm him into becoming some sort of informant. Seems to me he did nothing wrong at all.

In my head I kinda meant the monetizing or protecting patents bit more in a general sense than just this Google/Motorola and Apple case. I know that is not what Google is going for here.

I still think that no matter what the ITC injunctions are a low blow. Even the ITC is starting to realize that these injunctions are really anti-consumer actions by the companies involved and often the wrong way to deal with this whole mess.

Also, as proved by HTC and Samsung, ITC injunctions tend to often be trivial to work around. A little tweak to a feature and you can sell your device again, the only people harmed are consumers who have to deal with reduced functionality. This is of course much harder if you can stick them with a hardware patent instead of a software one.

The only way I see to end this is to manage to make something giant stick that will hit Apple for tens of billions of dollars so they are either bankrupted or forced into a huge cross-licensing agreement that makes all these lawsuits impossible. Sadly I''m not sure either one is very likely.